


Lucky Stars & Topaz

by unreadlibrary



Category: Cowboy Bebop (Anime)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, One-Shot Collection, Romance, Short, Vignettes, and happy endings, canon-typical language and violence and innuendo, mentions of Spike/Julia, vague endings, vaguely post-series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2020-06-25 00:05:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19734367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreadlibrary/pseuds/unreadlibrary
Summary: 1. Leaky Faucet: "Shut up, sweetheart."2. Innocent Speller: "I'm just a jangling man."3. Better Strangers: "And don't kiss me just because she's dead."4. Sprezzatura: "Why be Type A or Type B when you can be Type C?"5. Second Sight: "It's gonna be one of those kinda announcements, huh?"6. Backwards Walk: "Your timingsucks.It's even worse than mine."7. High Lonesome: "And I feel exiled among men."8. Topaz: "Whatever you say, cowgirl."9. Offstage Lines: "I've got a wish a mile high."10. Wedding Ring: "Well, be thou my vision."





	1. Leaky Faucet

“Faye, do me a favor.”

“What?” she sniffled. They lay on the bed, big spoon, little spoon. She was a warm scoop of vanilla tucked up against his side, refusing to not melt all over the sheets. Just crying raggedy-type tears, childishly loud and undisciplined. She said she was having an episode; she was empty; this was meaningless; the stars were going to suck them up into oblivion.

Spike would like to think her entire life was really one big random miracle. Both of their lives. In a manner of speaking, they’d both come back from the dead.

He sighed. “Shut up and go to sleep.”

She cried harder at that. His left arm was trapped under her side, his left hand held in her hands, covered with these warm, salty tears. She had a bronze-colored bangle around her wrist. Salted caramel vanilla. His nose was by her shoulder and he breathed in deep. Man, he wanted to sleep. He wanted to be kind. He wanted peace and quiet. He wanted her thighs and her eyes and her mouth, but all he had was this ruthless temper tantrum and this miraculous woman reduced to tears.

He takes his free right hand and cups her mouth.

“Please be quiet. Pretty please. With a cherry on top.”

She stops with the noises but not with the tears. Now she’s melting all over both of his hands. It occurs to him that he should explain what he means. He whispers in her ear:

“I’m still here, aren’t I? Shut up and sleep, you big baby,”

“Humph,” she says. He removes his hand.

“What’s that?” he says in a triumphant tone.

“I said,” she sniffs, “Rock me to sleep, then,”

“Yeah, not like I’m beat or anything,”

She turns in his arms, wiping her face on her pillow so she’s somewhat respectable. He likes the glimmer in her eye, despite himself. He tucks her hair behind her ear.

“What’s in it for me?” he asks with his trademark fake grin. It was always easy for him to grin; hard to really smile with a fake eye and all.

“Me.” Faye said. Spike considers this. He traced her mouth.

“If this came with a button and a snatch,” he said, “That’d be perfect,”

“And if you came with a heart…” she said, but her mouth went gentle underneath his. Sometimes she manages to be twenty-five, sometimes sixteen, sometimes one-hundred-and-eighteen. It’s all in her eyes. She’s got two of them, real ones, green ones, uncompromisingly honest, incapable of lying to him.

He places his pillow beneath their heads.

“I promise,” he said, his grin melting away into something unhidden, shared, “We’ll pick it up tomorrow,”

She turns her face into the pillow.

“…bacon,” she mumbles, “As long as there’s eggs and bacon—”

“Doesn’t take much to make you happy, huh?”

“—just diamonds and bacon and the meaning of life…can you promise me that? I’ll never moan and complain, never ever again…”

“Shut up, sweetheart,” he yawned, breathing in her vanilla scent. She’s already breathing like she’s half-asleep.

“Just,” he whispers now, suddenly capable of softness, “Shut the hell up,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by "Lullaby" by Louton Wainright III. For those waiting on my Samurai Champloo one-shot collection, I've got three in the pipes and one of them will also be inspired by this song haha.


	2. Innocent Speller

Spike Spiegel is an innocent speller.

Faye is not sure why this amuses her so much. Why it makes her pause.

She finds out through a crumpled note, tossed into a trash can she hadn’t really meant to loot. She was actually doing something nice and productive and taking the trash out—but this one piece of paper rolled out and it was practically screaming that it was her destiny to unfold it. Even seeing a handwritten note these days felt like such a thrill.

Half grocery list, half a strange sieve for stranger thoughts, she’d memorized the whole unwieldy thing, down to the bad spelling:

  
chocklette bars _(it’s like he’d over done the bad spelling part with this one—or is that just how they spelled ‘chocolate’ nowadays? She’d never noticed)_  
samon filay _(salmon fillet. She’s pretty sure. He loves salmon)_  
white undies _(he’s going to hate that she accidentally mixed her red halter in with the whites today)_  
bendy straws _(well he got that part right at least)_

Its a crool sawlitude,  
hunnybee.  
Im just a janglin man  
A spinnin man  
A dead man

Wensday. Oct. 12.

  
What was the middle part, some kind of song? Did he _write it_ or just _write it down_ ; something he’d overheard on the radio? And that date, no year. Faye had no idea.

But she did know it all had something to do with Julia. Even the bendy straws, why not? It was always Julia. And how could she blame him for loving someone like Julia? She was somehow an angel in white and a crack shot with a voice liked tinted glass. Every man’s wet dream.

She threw the paper out with the rest of the trash and continued to pretend like she didn’t know Spike Spiegel at all, without one iota of nuance or care. But deep down, she did feel bad about ruining the whites. About eating the last chocolate bar. About a lot of things. Like wanting him to call her hunnybee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some inspiration from Unknown Mortal Orchestra's "Hunnybee" and Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" and Cleaners of Venus' "Jangling Man."


	3. Better Strangers

The secretary gave Spike an actual, physical, paper-and-plastic catalog. You didn’t see those everyday. Even the labels were written out by hand, in ink, in _cursive_. Spike couldn’t read them.

There were a few laminated pages, each page filled with dockets, and each docket had a postcard-sized picture. Spike didn’t even bother looking at the pages that were listed ‘Premium.’ He stuck to the first page, the cheap page, to his nine choices, and even that was overwhelming. He stared at the page for a long minute, enough time for the smoke from his cigarette to reach the height of the tall blue-grey ceiling. The whole building, its secretary, its atmosphere, everything was blue-grey.

He chose a card at random and flipped it up on the secretary’s counter. But this was a classy place, so she reacted classily.

“Excellent choice, sir,”

“Is it?” He hadn’t looked. He hated indecision; and there was a certain thrill to not-knowing.

“Yes,” the secretary said. She had a nice female tenor, “Please wait behind this door. Give your hostess twenty minutes to prepare. We call this the ‘meditation phase.’ Quiet your mind and prepare for a U-nique(TM) experience,”

A door appeared out of nowhere, cutting a rectangle of bright white light in the blue-grey. Spike cocked an eyebrow and indicated his cigarette. The secretary nodded graciously. “We simply ask that you do not smoke when you enter your designated dream,”

They left Spike alone in that featureless white lobby for the promised twenty minutes. Thankfully, that awful brightness dimmed down. Now it was something more like a mild buttery color. The whole room could have felt septic, but instead, to Spike’s surprise, it was peaceful. The smell was clean. He wondered how they managed that here; even the best simulations were supposed to have an edge of fake to them.

Spike was still trying to convince himself that any of this was real.

That he hadn’t died in that explosion.

That the Red Dragon Syndicate really _was_ gone.

He felt along his rib cage. Jellied crystal—held up like bone, but didn’t break like bone. And now half of his ribs were made of the stuff. He was more foreign to himself than he’d ever been before. He closed his left eye so he could look out the real one. The fake hadn’t worked the same since That Day. His vision was blurry, but he had no desire to fix it.

He held up his hands next. The knuckles in his left one had been crushed to a fine dust, and now as he flexed them he could hear the slightest whir of machinery. His skin hadn’t grown back the right color, so he had four pale dots to further remind him of the fakery. Maybe he could wear gloves. Michael Jackson his way through life, or go full hog and join a space-bike gang.

He snorted; smoke spilled out his nostrils.

Maybe Jet had the right idea all along. Show off the fact that part of you isn’t real. Don’t try and hide it.

Spike wondered what Jet would say if he could see him now. The whole galaxy thought Spike Spiegel was dead. And it should probably stay that way, Spike thinks. Because even if the Red Dragon Syndicate was gone, a decapitated snake can still bite. Six months. Spike had been dead for six months, and this was his first foray into the land of blood and bone and human contact.

U-nique(TM) wasn’t a brothel or a premium fetish shop or a love motel or a striptease joint or a VR version of any of those. But it claimed to sell experiences. Despite it’s ironically uninspired name, it had piqued Spike’s curiosity. Besides, if he was liable to get embarrassed, he figured this was still better than getting drunk at a bar with a bunch of strangers. Even after being dead for six months, he was still burnt out on that sort of late night excursion. And this was more private. More safe.

But the longer he sat there meditating, the colder he felt.

He just wanted to be touched by a woman. Whatever dream he’d picked at random, it had to be something good. Let it be a haircut or a handshake or an out-of-wedlock hug, he didn’t care. His left hand was starting to shake. Side-effect of the new gears, he told himself, not nerves.

The lights changed again. Spike would have called the new tone sepia. The change in lights coincided with another door opening—not back out into the entry hall, but here at the side. Like a secret passage. Spike could hear a record—a physical record, the scratch, the dead air, the hand on the knob.

“C’mon, John,” A bright, soothing voice. Using the name he’d written down. He’d aimed for somewhere between conspicuous and inconspicuous, because that’s how you don’t get caught. So he’d written John S. Keaton, and now it was John S. Keaton that walked through the door.

It looked like a lived-in living room from the 60s—the 1960s, to clarify. Spike walked through an old photograph, which he figured is what must have been in the docket he chose. This sort of thing was starting to get popular—kind of an artsy way to sell a cure to loneliness. Tells guys and gals to pick a photo, a sketch, some album art, a famous painting, whatever, and they got an hour or two to explore it. Sometimes with a host or hostess. Sometimes with just a guided voice. Not all choices were about a false romance; none of them sold sex. Not even a slow strip or whatever. The pamphlet had shown people walking through a field of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and in another they were recreating the planting of the flag in some famous battle (Spike had never been a student of history), in another there was some luxury ocean cruiser before it sunk, and in another you could have a full-blown conversation with Mona Lisa herself.

Spike had chosen from the cheapies, though. He had chosen some obscure photo and he had no idea what to expect. He definitely did not expect a woman in a wedding gown to be waiting at the sliding door.

Even the simulated outside of this simulated house was convincing. Golden evening light spilled over a small lawn which led to a dock which led to a dark blue lake. The water looked cold and inviting. Spike had been sweating in his leisure suit. He loosened his tie as he stared at the back of the woman. Lace covered her back and yet it didn’t. She had a nice back, he had to admit, sharp shoulder blades. Hair so black it looked blue. Asian, then. The record had been playing the entire time and Spike just then noticed the words.

_If you're on the water, water, water, water, water beware._

He took stock of the cover art on the album. Just like he thought. It was an old photograph; a husband and wife having their first private dance.

He was actually sorta moved. Yet if a woman had so much as smiled in his direction he would have felt moved (the secretary definitely hadn’t smiled; she might have moved her mouth, she might have had nice teeth, but her eyes didn’t smile, didn’t even really look at him. Which was fine, because Spike hadn’t really been looking at her either). It had been six months of being dead. That kept repeating in his head. Dead. For six months. Was any of this real?

He sat in a chair opposite from the woman at the sliding door. His bride turned to him.

She was smoking a cigarette. And she was not smiling with her eyes. Her eyes were cold. She looked familiar. She was familiar. She had a name.

“Faye.”

He said it like a pompous jackass. He was leaning back in his mid-century chair, ankle crossed on knee, putting his own cigarette out in the ash tray nearby. Faye Valentine stood there in a wedding gown. Her hair had grown a little longer. She smelled good.

“It smells like grandma perfume in here,” he said.

She crossed the line between them, aiming her cigarette straight for the ash tray but making sure the arc got nice and close to his ear. He grinned again.

 _“John.”_ She said.

“And what should I call you?”

Her eyes were sad. Her mouth was hard but her eyes were sad. Spike was struck by the sudden impulse to cradle her face; his hand was already half-way in the motion, absolutely treacherous. It was his left hand. The hand with the fake knuckles. That made sense. His body betrayed him in everything but just finally calling it quits.

Faye took the proffered hand and helped him stand up. He was taller than her. In his memories, she’d always been the one bigger than him. Not physically, of course, but spiritually, morally. A full personality.

“We can talk and dance at the same time,” Faye huffed, “That’s what you paid for,”

“Didn’t really know what I was paying for,” She ignored his admission. Quickly straightened them into a waltzing position. Faye in a wedding dress. Huh.

“Call me Mary,” she said suddenly, with a defiant chin.

“John and Mary,” Spike said.

This wasn’t a lover’s waltz, let alone a dance between husband and wife. There was no polite distance between them. There was an angry, obligatory one. _I’m being paid to dance with you_ was one of the messages coming across. But there were other things that Faye was saying. That he was saying. There was so much to say and no way to say any of it. They could have given into cliches: I thought you were dead, you’re supposed to be dead, I’m back, I can’t believe it’s you, what have you been doing all this time, what happened to you. But Spike only paid for an hour.

The first shift came when she absently rubbed the knuckles of his left hand.

“That’s new,” she said.

“Yeah, just try elbowing me in the ribs now,” As usual, his laugh had no mirth. Then it was his turn to start up conversation. He wasn’t going to ask her how she got this job. He didn’t care to know—-but he did care that she was there. If he was being honest, anyway, which wasn’t a mood he fell into very often.

What had for the first five seconds felt like a cruel joke, then like a weird coincidence, now felt like some sign of fate. He was always guessing wrong about fate. The whys, the whats, the whereabouts. For some reason, it hadn’t been his fate to die. It had been Julia’s. Who was he without Julia? Now that she was really dead, he’d have to actually consider that. He’d have to actually live with that.

“Shouldn’t there be wedding bands?” he asked, absently.

“You’d have to throw in a few more woolongs,” Faye whispered. It wasn’t so much the words, it was how she said them, how she said them _barely_. It made him aware of her fragility, and maybe even his. There hadn’t been any bitterness in her voice. She hadn’t meant it to sound sardonic. She did accomplish this; she made Spike arc his head closer to hers. The crown of her head was soft; the quality of her warmth was satisfying. They could almost be friends. It was so human and so what he’d been looking for that it made Spike want to run away. Go jump in that cold, fake lake and have his cold, fake knuckles go numb. They went numb in the shower, now. A weird side effect; a constant reminder.

“Is that so?” His own voice got a little rough at this pitch. He could feel it pass through his skin and bones and into hers. They’d gotten closer in the last minute. And that was the second shift.

The record played the same song over and over again but somehow it wasn’t irritating. They turned in circles, over and over, and the song looped, over and over. Maybe they could make this hour last.

The third shift came about when he leaned his head on her shoulder. She stiffened.

“Hey, it’s just like the picture,” Spike was the one whispering now. He breathed in her scent. She started to relax.

“You smell good,” he finally admitted. He didn’t hold her hand, he held her wrist. Her hand bunched up in a fist. He could feel her shaking, her whole body, and he had to hold her. He’d never been that kind to her. He remembered, in their recent past, that she had at least tried to be kind to him. Absence made the heart grow fonder; she’d been a bigger memory than he could have guessed. And she was still shaking like she’d just fired a gun. And since they were already in that time-out-of-time that would only last an hour and where words weren’t enough, they had entered into the closeness and kindness of strangers. She could fully collapse in his arms and he could sink with her to the carpet. To the carpet that actually smelled like somebody’s living room carpet, with years of smoke and footsteps and making love.

Faye wrestled out of his arms. A bird that didn’t want to be caged. Spike understood that. She pointed her thumb and index into his rib cage.

“Bang,” she whispered. Then she moved her gun to his shoulder.

“Or was it here?”

She pointed at the space between his eyebrows next, held her aim.

“Here?”

She spread her hands to either side of his face. Touched him lightly. She looked like she’d run—like he’d reject her. Again.

“Where?” she asked.

He hadn’t been aware that any of it was in him, the ice in his chest, the peace, the river.

“Here,” he said, a perfect opening, and he guided her hand to his throat. So that she could strangle him or kiss him or just wrap her arms around him. It would all have the same effect. She moved her cool hands to his throat and he swallowed. She kissed his Adam’s apple, which made him swallow again. He felt blocked. There was water and a dam and that was just a crude metaphor; he wasn’t after sex. This wasn’t a porno set; he wouldn’t do _that_ with Faye. Not here, not now, not like that. This white lace did something to him. Made him treat her like—what, an antique? She glared at him when he laughed. He shook his head. He knew there was some truth to that statement—Faye, an antique. A chronological centenarian. But the body beating along his was twentysomething, with all the experience of a twentysomething, with all that fear and hope.

Spike recalled that he wasn’t actually all that old either.

He hauled her up by the waist, causing her to make a sound of surprise, and, with just a bit of salvaged grace, he plopped her down by his side. He turned to face her, nearly nose to nose, and put his arm lightly over her side. A cage she could easily break out of, if she wanted.

This was the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the seventh or so shift.

He could barely hear the music now.

“What usually happens at this point?” he asked her. She actually smiled, though she knit her eyebrows together to tell him she was still on edge.

“I’m usually dancing with retirees,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest like a schoolgirl, “And vets, y’know? People about to go into hospice, trying to make one last decision for themselves. We just dance and they tell me their life stories. Sometimes they confess to me, like I’m really that girl they let get away all those years ago,”

She turned so that she was resting partly on her shoulder blades; she’d always been amazing at angles, Spike thought absently. She directed her gaze at the ceiling.

“There’s nobody alive who even knew what it was like growing up in the 1960s,” she said, “Not even me. My dad—he was born in ‘67. My mom was a little older. 1965. So even they don’t really count. It’s just kinda funny, that’s all. Why is it so easy to feel at home in the past, even if that past isn’t yours?”

“Because it’s filled with the ones that got away,” Spike said. Maybe he’d been thinking about something she’d said just a moment ago. Maybe he’d had that answer for a while. But even coming back from the dead, he still didn’t have an answer that satisfied him. He figured the secret, now, was that you couldn’t get satisfying answers. Satisfaction existed somewhere outside Q&As, outside reason, outside mortality. But since he was mortal, despite not being as mortal as he wanted sometimes, he knew he’d have to keep dealing with some level of dissatisfaction. He turned to Faye then, turning in closer, making up for her half-turned body. She didn’t relax into him; he had never given her any reason to before. It was time to leave words out of the equation again. Because words didn’t satisfy either. What did begin to satisfy, what did get that river inside of him to flow, was kissing her full on the mouth.

She pushed him away from her.

“Don’t kiss a woman out of pity, Spike,” she spat, “Don’t kiss me because you’re lonely. And don’t kiss me just because she’s dead,”

They never had pulled punches with one another.

“Give me a break, Faye,” he said. He didn’t close the new gap between them; he instinctively knew that was her job. But he did make a confession, “I’ve been meaning to do that. Ain’t a dead man still entitled to his bucket list?”

Faye shook her head violently, tears in her eyes. She was so goddamn honest all the time.

“I’ve had a while to think about it, Spike,” she said. The white lace became her more and more.

She swallowed, “We’re strangers,”

Spike was silent. When he grinned, a little, it crinkled up the skin around his fake eye. He felt like he was viewing the world through tears he wasn’t crying, through an exhaustion that had finally transferred from the existential to the physical, and it was all causing his vision to betray him. Finally he just closed his left eye altogether and squinted out of his right.

“Not complete strangers. I know that your dad was born in ‘67, and your mom was a cougar ‘cause she was born in ‘65. I know your first name is real but your last name is fake. And I know you look darling in a cheerleader’s skirt,”

Her face had completely changed at the word ‘darling.’ Let her think he was being out-of-character; they were just getting to really know each other; he had a million things that could surprise her.

No, the look on her face now was less surprise than embarrassment.

“Looky here, a blushing bride,” he said.

Faye kicked him in the shin. He took it. Because then they were nose to nose again.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“Hm?”

“A secret. A fact. You know all this stuff about me. Tell me anything,”

He leaned up on his elbow, looking down at her scowl. That scowl had always been a mask for her innocence. She was poetry. That’s why he couldn’t grasp her. He wasn’t an artful man.

Blood coursed through him. It felt awful, as bad as a numb limb being forced to move and take on weight again. Pins and needles. And when the pins and needles were done, it was bad as runner’s stitch, but all through his chest. The dam was broken and the river had no flow. Why the hell had he been so bent on feeling alive again? He’d come here for a fake, temporary release. He should have just gotten his nails done. Gotten a haircut. Hell, gone to a love motel. This was more than he’d bargained for. Faye had always been more than he could afford to bargain for.

“I was born on Mars,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “And?”

“I think I’m German,”

“And?”

“I’m not dead,”

“And?”

“My favorite food is peppers and beef,”

“And?”

“My least is shrimp-flavored ramen,”

“And?”

“I actually suck at pool,”

“And?”

“I’m a scoundrel,”

“And?”

“I’m a murderer,”

“…And?”

“I’m not kind, Faye,”

Her lipstick was slightly smeared where he had kissed her. Her mouth parted a little as she inched a bit closer and took his left hand. It was like they were waltzing again, but on a different plane.

“You don’t let yourself,” she said, barely, “I get that,”

She smoothed one hand down his chest. He hardened his stomach for her, and tried to hide the hitch in his breath.

“But I learned something while you were gone, Spike. ‘Cause the world keeps on turning, believe it or not. And I learned the world doesn’t have to be kind in order for you to be kind,” She was in her schoolgirl mannerisms again. Her eyes were downcast, her voice was haling back to fifty, sixty, however many years ago. Old Faye and New Faye finally merged. “You can be kind to me. We’ve got ten minutes left,”

He was silent a moment. “If I kiss you, are you gonna castrate me?”

 _“No.”_ She said the word heavily, and it made him feel so light.

“Well, I wanna kiss you,”

“Then you should be doing that already,”

She hummed when he did—was this every perfect woman’s reaction to being kissed? Spike loved the vibration that passed between them. He loved the combination of cool lace and female warmth and carpet burn. He loved her voice, the way it no longer sounded off-key because Faye knew who she was. She wasn’t trapped, strangled between the real and the fake, like he was. Like he’d been.

Faye’s hair. Thick, blue-black, a river. Her spine was a river. Her throat. When she kissed him back, it felt like resuscitation. When he interlaced his left hand with hers he tried to imagine a wedding band there; the pressure of her fingertips over his fake knuckles made him feel like all his whining over the fakery was for nothing. He was alive. He was definitely, definitely alive.

Making out soon turned into something more intimate. Time was running out. He cradled her, and though there was something cold about having her back to him again, he felt the need to make her feel protected, to protect something. Her head was still turned so that he could kiss her, slow, breathing on threads, like they’d been kissing for years, like they really were husband and wife, and not about to become better strangers than they were before.

He held her while the record went on loop, and for as long as he could after the record stopped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by “When You’re On the Water” by the Saxophones. Less for the lyrics than for the album art and the atmosphere of the song itself. 
> 
> Title comes from that great Shakespearean insult, "I desire that we may be better strangers."


	4. Sprezzatura

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A character study on Spike.

**Rule # 1. Never get into a fight unless you’re wearing an old pair of shoes.**

Growing up less than poor makes you practical. And, when you have so little, you don’t ruin what’s new and shiny. You treasure that crap. 

Spike made the mistake once when he was a kid. Slummin’ it up in Mars; he thought was cool as any cat, could slink down any alleyway in the broad daylight or in the dark of night.

He’d swiped the shoes off a drunk business man who had collapsed on the corner. Spike had always had big, gangly feet fit for a tall, gangly body. Growth spurts and poverty made a terrible mix. Spike should have just pawned the shoes and gotten himself some bread. But he fell in love with those shoes, demmmit (they had a chap named, well, Chap, who made that kind of cheerful swearing popular. Spike sometimes missed the days before he’d graduated to the adult arena of sex, drugs, and actual damnation. But yeah, back then, he thought he was the man just muttering ‘Demmit!’ out a crack in his mouth).

The shoes were too big for him, but they felt like clouds on his feet. His old shoes had blood baked from the Martian sun around the hem; blood from a thousand blisters and cramped toes. Sure, they held up in a scrap and kept his feet from freezing during the hellish Martian nights, but those were its only two virtues.

But his new shoes proved a new type of hell; Spike found that out in his first gang fight, which occurred only about a week after the theft. His kicks didn’t land. He tripped. He got beaten to a pulp.

Sevvy, the old French boxer who lived on Cateye Corner (and who incidentally looked like a boxer, all square muzzle and medium-sized might), clucked his tongue at Spike. Twisted a terrible, well-meaning punch into one of his kidneys.

“Boy, you been comin’ here to box since before you even bothered with shoes,” he said, “And I was kind enough to be stupid, lending you that pair you just dismissed like yesterday’s panties. Wanna know a secret, _petite peste_? Never get into a fight unless you’re wearing an old pair of shoes,”

“Why?” Spike was stubborn enough to speak through a cracked baby tooth and a monstrously swollen cheek. He tried to spit blood but he just ended up slobbering on his chin.

 _ **“Demmit,”**_ he said, with feeling.

Sevvy laughed at him.

“Clue’s in the name,” Sevvy said, “I’mma teachin’ you _savate_ boxing. No, don’t bother to pronounce it, you’ll only make me cry. You can call it old shoe boxing. ‘Cause we ain’t no dandies out here with shiny loafers—and even if we were, we’d still have our manly pride! Old shoes kick the best because they’ve been kicked in. Save the new stuff for showing off or sell it so you can afford some God-blessed salmon patties—nothing less,”

Sevvy was stupid enough to be kind to Spike after that and split a salmon patty sandwich with him. Extra horseradish. But, when you have so little, you don’t start developing taste buds. And to this day that’s Spike’s go-to pick-me-up: salmon patty, poor man’s bread, extra horseradish. Smell of old leather and boxing ring sweat. Dem fine stuff.

**Rule # 2. Kids are the worst.**

Spike Spiegel grew up in the slums of Mars, so he knew how ruthless a bunch of hungry, angry, desperate, undisciplined kids could be.

Spike hated it when people gushed over kids. Kids weren’t even cute when you gave them everything their hearts desired. They were little tyrants ruling over a fake kingdom of family-friendly demands. In fact, if Spike can get on his soap box here, childhood was just a commodity the decently well-off could afford. _**They’d**_ created it—who ‘They’ was, he wasn’t sure. Terraformers with bags of money, probably. And their ancestors. The ones who decided that age groups were great for the economy, and who were solely responsible for mall rats, report cards, and ‘Protect the Children’ pickets.

It made Spike want to puke.

Not that he’d recommend the way he grew up.

It’s just, in general, kids were the worst because people were the worst. Kids were little people in training.

Of course, Spike doesn’t count the three good childhood friends he can count on hand. There was Chap and Chuly and Chubb—Spike had chosen his name just to stick out from the pack, and that made him the de facto leader. But Spike and the Cha-Cha-Cha’s had done pretty O-K in the junior league grand hierarchy of the slums. They still had to deal with those teenaged Rhinos and then there were the Minis (they ended up calling them the Mickey’s and the Minnie’s, and they were terrifying in their dimestore Disney Halloween masks) from the guerrilla army that operated just on the outskirts of the city, and the blood gang called the Nom Noms (you know you’re a force to be reckoned with when, even though your mascot is a cute little shark and your gang name is Nom Noms, people still can’t bear to mention the name without whispering it or peeing in their pants).

But despite all that, there were still the worst kids of all—kids who didn’t have a clan or a hustler or an army to enforce them to do anything, to protect them, give them food, shelter, purpose. It was kids like that who started knifing early, and who were liable to steal your food and your shirt, and then they'd start knifing for no reason at all. They were the ones who'd leave you for dead in a heart beat.

Well, maybe they didn’t all do that. Some would just look at you, shell-shocked, or worse, they would smile softly, kindly—like, they had it worse than you but they could still smile, and Spike hated that and loved that because it was painful, knowing that being better off and being happy despite all the crap was _**still an option**_. So mostly he just ignored Those Kids and gathered his conclusion that the conglomerate of kids were the worst.

Spike still wondered, every now and then, if Chap ever learned to swear (Spike hoped that he hadn't) and if Chubb had ever shed that baby fat (but then what would they call him?) or if Chuly ever got over his fear of heights (all Chuly ever wanted was to go to outer space; he was just caught up on the sky and the gravity in between).

And Spike sometimes wondered if they had ever had any kids of their own.

**Rule # 3. Know what’s expendable.**

People were always feeding the choice scraps to the _**animals**_ in the slums (Spike hadn't counted as an animal, that was for sure). People were always adopting the strays (the four-legged ones, forget the abandoned spawn of your neighbors).

In fact, Spike once knew a cat that snuck sympathy from _**ten different tenements** \--_but the thing never got caught because it remained miraculously skinny and had a nice, clean, white coat, so that made people more comfortable with the fleabag running in and out of their lives. Spike once got the idea that the cat (he never called it the cat—but he did call it just exactly what it was, to his juvenile satisfaction) simply knew how to read people; that these were the right apartments to beg a little warmth and gruel from. Heck, maybe one of them would have a nice lady and a pop who needed a boy to help on their farm (they lived in the middle of a Martian city but a starving boy could dream). So, one day when he couldn't stand that feline anymore, Spike slicked back his hair and stole a nice white button down from off a clothesline and made his rounds.

Spike ended up wrong on all ten fronts. Some of the apartment owners were nice about it. Most were awkward about it. One absolutely terrified Spike, but he got his revenge. He smeared their door with the trash they’d compared him to.

No, he finally concluded, people only liked things that made them feel good about themselves. So they put stickers all over their doors and their space shuttle windows about what a loving Cat Mama they were or how their children were just so gosh darn adorable and fuzzy.

Spike hated animals.

See, it was an animal that got Sharon killed. Sharon. Only pretty girl that they hadn’t gotten to yet. She was a pipsqueak in a backwards baseball cap, and didn’t like to hurt anybody, anything. She apologized to the flies she swatted and the glass bottles she stepped on. Once, she’d shared a salvaged root beer with Spike. He’d always thought of her like a sister. At least, for the two weeks that he’d known Sharon. She was new to the trash heap; Chubb had a crush on her. She was almost one of the boys.

But see, Sharon just didn’t know what was expendable. Like animals. If your trash heap is suddenly invaded by a rival gang war, you cover for _**your**_ hide first—not some stray dog’s. But Sharon didn’t see it that way. The guns started blazing and then there was some napalm—and, it’s like Spike is there again, he can smell the burning fur. A stray mutt had gotten caught in the fray and his back was on fire. Sharon refused to leave without him. She’d stowed away a whole case of root beer, in secret, and she brought it out and dashed the tops off the glass so she could pour the liquid on the dog’s back. The stupid mutt kept running around in circles and wasting her efforts. Spike finally had to turn tail and run because the guns were getting closer. He kept shouting at Sharon but his voice was getting farther and farther away. She finally did manage to get that fire out, but life’s random bits of poetry got to her too—the bullet was perfectly timed and she dropped dead just as soon as the fire had dissipated.

Spike would see the mutt walking around sometimes, with a scarred back and a sad but grateful gimp. Yeah, that dog knew it didn’t deserve to live in Sharon’s place. Chubb sorta adopted him anyway. Chubb was large on patience and short on grudges. Now that he’s a little older, Spike muses darkly, that, despite growing up on an empty stomach and with plenty of room to grow, he just didn’t have that kinda space in him to forgive.

But hey, even if Spike may not have been a fan of humanity, at least he had his priorities straight. You wouldn't see him throwing away his life for anybody less than human. 

  
**Rule # 4. Don’t be Type A or Type B when you can be Type C.**

Spike knew that, in the end, **_nobody_** got away Scotch-free with a perfect childhood. He graduated from childhood to adulthood just like everybody else--with just one or two or a thousand clues shy of making sense of it all.

He went on to do what he did best: survive, barely.

See, he’s not much of a psychology nut, and he could care less about personality quizzes and horoscopes (there’s very little difference between the two), but he does like to attach his own theory to popular ones. And this is his contribution:

Why be Type A or Type B when you can be Type C?

Why be uptight and successful or carefree and passive when you can be clever AND lazy?

Type C: thriving, barely. Some call that _sprezzatura_. 

**Rule # 5. Avoid where the angels fear to tread.**

  
In general, you should avoid a woman’s heart. If the angels fear to tread there, so should you.

Spike doesn’t always take his own advice, though.

But _**demmit,**_ its not like he’s trying to be a walking cliche: he just knows some rules are made to be broken.

And this one he broke twice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Author Just Talks About Herself In This One:
> 
> Heyo! I'm proud of this piece because it's part of my effort to get some of my voice back and to incorporate my values a bit more. Um, no, I don't hate kids or animals, but see, I made a conscious effort to represent a crude character without resulting to swearing and stuff (when you're always writing from the POV of Spike or Mugen or typical bad boy protagonists, you start to run into snags here and there). I'm finding that balance--not being preachy and annoyingly septic about life, being honest about a character and life in general without going Pollyanna or, what's a good example, I dunno, any postmodern writer after the 60s. Y'know, not whitewashing stuff and not being irresponsible either. If I had to think of someone who makes a good balance with that stuff, I'd say Flannery O'Connor <3\. Anyway, I'm excited to get creative in my own way again. Thanks for reading!


	5. Second Sight

> _“Somebody told her to go down and knock on my door and she did and I opened the door and there she was and that was it._
> 
> _That was it for me. Love at first sight. Love at second sight.”_
> 
> - **Tom Waits** , talking about his wife (which somehow always becomes poetry)

\--

**2056 A.D.**

Everybody in the slums called it the Museum, but it was anything but. It was a warehouse with crappy security; they’d haul in temporary shipments, usually strange old things from Earth itself, shipments that had earned Warehouse 82 its nickname. Whenever new cargo arrived, slummers made it out with a few weird, sometimes priceless knickknacks, and then the shipments were moved out in a little under two weeks; everybody was happy. Spike’s friends told him that this time around they’d stocked up on old cryostasis pods in transit from Earth. Chuly put it this way:

“Let’s go see some home world titties!”

Probably a good idea to get it over with now; shipments like these came once in a blue moon, and they moved quickly. Lately they’d been getting a lot more shipments from Earth—last year they’d rescued a whole zoo of animals, and Spike saw a tiger for the first time. The lions were his favorite, even with their ribs showing. The lack of gravity hadn’t been kind. Spike had never been to space before, himself. They said it was better for humans because some genius had invented Astronomical Invention #999 and figured out how to keep human body mass in check during long space voyages.

The Museum always got Spike thinking about things like that. Outlandish things. Tigers, lions, and spacesuits. He knew he’d make it out of the slums one of these days, gravity be damned.

So he and Chuly and Chubb and Chap snuck in the usual way—through the child-sized air ducts. They dropped down into the Museum and immediately looked at one another, eyes wide. Chap’s teeth were already chattering from the cold.

“What’d you expect?” Spike said, keeping his chattering to a minimum, keeping his cool to a max, “ _ **Cryo**_ -stasis,”

Well, the first thing they discovered was nobody was actually cryoed in the nude. But the guys made a big show out of seeing women in what appeared to be, essentially, bath towels. There was also the game of guessing how much money each person made and had paid to get frozen like this. What diseases they were dying of, or what obligations they were running away from. They gave them names, drawing obscene creations into the dust filtered on the glass and showing off their knack for dog-eared puns: Harry Balz, Papa Chubby, Master Bates, and so on and so forth. Chuly said he’d heard this particular batch had been frozen for almost _**forty** **years**_.

Spike eventually branched out on his own. The guys knew him well enough to know that meant he didn’t want to be followed. As de facto leader, he also called the shots. He walked further, down a few rows, Chubb and Chuly and Chap’s snickering fading in the background. There was now just the blue hum of each cryostasis pod, the occasional bubble moving slowly beneath the glass, a breath captured half a century ago and not yet released.

He’s not sure why her unit stood out from anybody else’s; perhaps it was just that moment, where that particular silence began, because Spike wouldn’t recall that moment again until many years later. It’s like the memory itself went frozen, unmoving, and thawed at just the wrong moment. But that was later. Right then and there, he stopped in the middle of the row and looked at the eyelashes that had caught his eye.

It was a woman with the cleanest skin Spike had ever seen. Even compared to those in the other pods, the woman’s skin was immaculate, poreless even, mostly untroubled. Except that her expression looked like it was half-caught in a dream, and whether it was a good dream or a bad dream was hard to tell.

Spike didn’t call for the others. They’d slice up the atmosphere with their sharp elbows, catcalling, making a joke about breasts that Spike knew he would laugh at. And he didn’t want to laugh here, now. For the first time in a long time his life _**didn’t**_ feel like little more than a joke.

Couldn’t even see all of the girl’s face. She had short hair, dark, tinted blueish in the cryostasis fluid. A layer of Martian dust, the gritty red stuff that got in everyone’s teeth and gave Martians a reputation for spitballing (and hacking lungs), covered the glass and Spike wouldn’t lift one finger to brush it away. There wasn’t a name anywhere. Spike smirked; he was used to that. His favorite part about history is that everyone back then seemed to take for granted that they had a given name, and not one they had to make up for themselves. Spike wasn’t even registered by the government, a fact that made him feel peacockish, untethered, dangerous, unsafe. Depended on his mood, really. 

It turned his stomach, like the rest of him, cold. Ordinary people with names and families and crap didn’t belong in museum cases.

On the back of each cryostasis pod were stickers, tons of them, each showing the personal passport of each pod. The girl’s container had been _**everywhere**_. He wondered why hers had been shifted around so much. He wondered when they’d finally wake her up.

Could he wake her up? What would happen? What if she was dying? He was transfixed by the boyish desire to kiss her awake; wondering if her lips would cave in like snow, or melt, like an ice cube. He’d never kissed a girl before. He searched all over the container, looking for the possibility, imagining a switch panel or a big red button. He didn’t find anything. Even if he had, he knew how far his courage could take him. Not very far.

He could hear voices coming closer. Without thinking too much this time, he placed a hand on the glass. His fingerprints showed up dusty red, placed around her collar bone. He took his sleeve and cleared more dust, not sure exactly what he felt at the sight of her body. He wasn’t exactly unmoved.

He left her face alone, obscured. He could still only see a fringe of dark hair, her eyelids half-dreaming.

He met the guys a ways down from her row, and managed to convince them it was time to head out. When they emerged from the Museum, they forgot how absolutely unforgiving Mars at mid-day could be. Spike, still and always de facto leader, convinced them to steal some iced drinks from one of the vendors in the Market Square.

They started walking towards the abandoned baseball diamond after that, the others doing all the talking, already on to the next thing, while Spike sucked each ice cube in turn and thought about nothing in particular.

—

**2072 A.D.**

It’s like the memory itself went frozen, unmoving, and thawed at just the wrong moment.

Spike spat out a wad of reddish saliva.

“I _**hate**_ that habit of yours,” Disoriented, Spike only vaguely noticed that it was Jet that was addressing him. In what year, for which vice, he wasn’t sure. Not at the moment. Had he been dreaming? Remembering? Was this Upstairs or Downstairs?

Jet angrily pulled on a spool of white bandage. Ah, yes, it was coming back to him now. The physical side of things, first. His whole body felt like it needed a tourniquet.

There’d been an explosion. Julia was dead. Vicious. Suddenly Spike’s body lurched.

“The Red Dragon Synd—ngh, gah—” Now he was spasming, and all Jet could do was wait. When Spike’s body relaxed, his breathing came in, ragged.

“Still bleeding through,” Jet sighed. Snap of scissors, shorter length of bandage, applied over cotton. Fever pounded in Spike’s head, and his side was screaming. He was alive, and that meant pain.

*

Recovery also meant getting adjusted to a few new facts. As Spike’s body healed over the following weeks, it also updated him on a few changes:

One, he could no longer see out of his right eye. His right eye, quite frankly, didn’t exist. Spike imagined God had pounded him on his back hard enough to wake him from the dead _**and**_ for his implant to go flying across the field where he and Vicious had bled out. The image of it was enough to make him laugh out loud and pop a stitch. Hurt like hell, and Jet gave him a headache for it on top of it.

Two, he’d never fight like he used to. It was a combination of the bullet and the knife that had dug the bullet out and saved his life—both had torn through a sample of Spike’s _teres major_ and _minor_ , leaving a hefty scar across the _anterior serratus_ , which all meant turning into a roundhouse kick, throwing a punch——compromised. He could adjust his style again, sure. He could probably even get a new cybernetic eye. But he wasn’t willing to do the things he’d done before to get it. A lot of blood had been shed for just one black market upgrade, and that thing had never shown Spike things that made him happy anyway. Besides, he was pretty sure if he shed any more blood than he had already, God wouldn’t be there to pound the ever-living hell out of his back again.

*

At three months, he was walking mostly without a limp but still spitting out red into the sink. Strangely, it just reminded him of the slums. He could feel the Martian grit in his teeth, barely taste the iron in the blood. When Spike looked at himself in the mirror, he kept having to adjust to the eye patch. He looked ridiculous. Like a dime store pirate.

The non-physical side of things recovered in fits and bursts. In dreams. Snatches all of out time-line; stitches all out of pattern. Well, Spike had never been a straightforward person.

Particular scenarios would replay more than others. Black-blue hair, but Julia’s eyes. One tiger slipping through a cage, leaving the other behind. Stone lions, a swordfish, bad mushrooms, cryostasis, bath towels, red dust, Corgi clippings, bonsai, a shower that never had any hot water, knives at a gunfight, smoke in a pool hall.

But most of all, this broken record: _“I’m going to find out if I’m really alive.”_

Spoken like a true jackass.

*

The Red Dragon Syndicate knew Spike was alive. They were the ones, Jet admitted, that had rushed him into care in the first place.

“Wong,” Spike remembered, picturing the old leathery face of the Dragon’s favorite underground doctor, “Knew he had a soft spot for me,”

What was more, the Red Dragon Syndicate was no longer syndicated. Like a snake, no, more like a worm, each severed piece had grown a new head and gone its separate way. The section that had rescued Spike had wanted them for a leader. Jet had lied and told them Spike would never walk again. That lie wouldn’t last long, and Spike knew he’d still live his whole life wondering who waited down dark alleys, but he was freer than he’d ever been. It was a fact he took in with his usual amused sadness.

He could walk now, and would only start limping if he pushed it. That meant going to bed and getting up at hours that would’ve let him fit right in at a retirement center. When Spike had thoughts like that, he got over his habitual laziness and would force himself to do a hundred, two-hundred push ups. Jet would watch over him; these days, it seemed like Jet was always on the verge of saying something but never saying it. It was already getting on Spike’s nerves, but one day he stopped mid push-up, a spasm running up his side, stars behind his one good eye. He flipped over on his back, arms and legs sprawling, feeling like an insect in its last hour. Pathetic. He felt pathetic. And when Jet approached him, all grouchy concern, Spike spat at him. Literally.

“Would you just come out with it?!” Spike managed, “You’ve been hovering for days and I feel like hell—just tell me what it is you want to tell me already!”

Jet waited until Spike wasn’t sucking in breath like he was sucking in daggers, in the meantime procuring two bottles of beer.

“It’s gonna be one of those kinda announcements, huh?” Spike said, taking the promised cure-all. Unfortunately, he didn’t even get buzzed easily. Not anymore. Not for a long time. He still took a swig for good measure and willed himself to relax. Whatever Jet had to say, Spike could handle it. He fortified himself with a second gulp. “Okay, shoot.”

“I think the only way you’re gonna recover is if you get back to work,” Jet said. Spike was annoyed at this for several reasons. One, why would Jet hesitate to tell him that, and two, Spike was lazy and he liked it that way.

“Let me guess,” Spike said, “You’ve got a special assignment just for me?”

“Yup,” Jet said, clapping Spike on the shoulder where Jet knew it would hurt, “It’s time to pay your medical bills,”

Spike drank some more.

“Look,” Jet said, “It’s easy. So easy I could do it—but I haven’t had a moment to myself thanks to somebody I know. It’s just a delivery service,”

“Just a delivery service?”

“What? Sad you don’t get a uniform? I told you it was easy, not glamorous,”

Spike was aware of the eerie feeling of wanting to roll his eyes but realizing he had only one eye to roll. “Alright, who?”

“More like where,” Jet said. Oddly evasive. He was pulling something up on one of his portable screens, passing it to Spike.

“I’ve got a package that needs to go here, in person, and I ain’t paying through the nose for the new postal fees they’re touting. Besides, you can do the grocery shopping on your way back,”

“What, it’s here on Ganymede?”

“Don’t you love it when I go easy on you?”

Spike grunted and turned over on his side. “Fine, just put the package in my room. I’ll get to it. Eventually.”

*

It really was just a plain brown package. Even had the old-fashioned string wrapped around it. Spike shook the thing to try to get an idea of what it was. Hey, it’s not like it listed ‘FRAGILE’ on the packaging. Couldn’t decipher anything just from that. And Spike respected Jet’s privacy because Spike respected privacy in general. So beyond the amateur detective work he didn’t try to open the package and sneakily put it back together, though he easily could have, leaving no hint of infiltration. One of his many mostly useless talents.

A few days later, when he was bored, he finally decided to deliver the thing. He didn’t tell Jet he was leaving, but he did take a look in the fridge, counted over their meager finances, and put together a mental grocery list. Then, for the first time in months, he took a step outside the Bebop.

To be honest, he’d taken a few fresh air trips to the balcony, mostly to retrieve underwear off the clothesline or to do a little fishing. But this was the real deal now.

Ganymede had carried on like nothing had changed and like nothing ever would. If anybody recognized Spike Spiegel, they gave no indication.

The address led him to an unassuming apartment block, two stories, with apartments on the bottom and the top. The red paint was chipping, but the neighborhood was only run-down, not seedy, and the bright colors of the buildings could even be mistaken for cheery. Spike climbed the stairs to the second floor. A potted plant, a little dry from the sun, hung by ropes from the balcony ceiling and swung gently by the door. Other than this apartment and its sad little plant, all the other apartments were identical. Spike knocked a quick rhythm on the door and shifted the package in his hands. There was no peep hole for the occupant to look out of. He wondered what kind of impression his eye patch would leave.

Nobody answered. Spike tried again. He wasn’t even sure why he had the sudden desire to see someone appear from the other side. He could just leave the package at their doorstep and call it a day. Jet never made him agree to signing anything. Maybe Spike was more curious than he gave himself credit for. What kind of secretive acquaintance could Jet have here on Ganymede? Someone Jet had met while Spike was knocked out cold?

He knocked a third time, feeling a little desperate, and still no answer. He shrugged.

He was stooping to leave the package on the welcome mat when the door finally opened. Spike straightened up a little too quickly, knocking his head on the potted plant.

So he sees her like this: a little off balance, through one eye, pain knotting up at the back of his skull, her figure hallowed in a reddish light reflecting off the chipped red paint, her gesture frozen in place, and all of it feels like deja vu, and out of place and out of time, like in a dream.

Faye Valentine was standing there with her hair in a domestic bun, wearing ordinary clothes for once, and he’d caught her completely off guard. But then she’d done the same to him.

“You—” she began.

 _“You—”_ she tried again.

 _ **“You—”**_ she swallows, thickly, _**“You look like a dime store pirate.”**_

*

The easiest way for them to break the ice was to share a cigarette while Spike watched Faye open her package. Faye had incidentally given up the habit, smoking, and Spike had only one left in the carton at his breast pocket, but that didn’t stop Faye from demanding an inhale. She didn’t even apologize when she handed the cigarette back to him and there was red lipstick plastered on the end.

But Faye _**had**_ changed. There was no mistaking. She’d probably always been like this. Like what? A little gentler, a little lighter, a little more substantial. Maybe it was just seeing her in a different outfit. Maybe it was just seeing her with one eye instead of two. Maybe he was just seeing things.

Spike looked around her apartment. Small, respectable. Not exactly neat and tidy, but there wasn’t a whole lot of junk to misplace. She hadn’t given up alcohol, that was for sure, but any spare bottles were thrown away in the trash instead of spread around generously like she’d made the habit of doing on the Bebop. She had curtains on all the windows, locks on all the doors. And she really, really like candles—the ones with the too-strong scents, jasmine tea and pine needles and cherry blossoms, she lit all these different candles all at once. She even had incense burning. It smelled like a temple in there. There was a small TV and a box of assorted beta and VHS tapes; apparently DVDs and chips weren’t welcome.

She was through opening the package.

Her glock. A collection of nude-colored thigh-highs. The beta tape. Just some personal effects. Faye promptly threw the thigh-highs into the trash and went to the back bedroom to stow away the beta tape. The glock she kept pointedly on the table.

“Figures that’s all he’d send me,” Faye said, but her smile was warm, if not exactly generous. As soon as it livened her face, her face returned to neutral.

“Want something to drink?” she asked him.

What followed was a strangely domestic scene. They didn’t speak at all while Faye set the tea kettle on the stove and poured him a glass of water while they waited. She didn’t have an ashtray so Spike put out his cigarette on his pant leg, at which Faye only cocked an eyebrow.

“How many leisure suits do you own anyway?” she asked.

“Dunno—my blue one went missing,”

“That old thing,” Faye snorted.

“God, anything’s better than that halter you used to wear,” He was dangerously close to saying that what she was wearing _**now**_ looked good. Mini-skirt, button-down blouse; why hadn’t it occurred to him until just then to imagine popping the buttons? He’d never had any inclination toward her that way, that’s why. Even now, with Faye looking the most attractive she’d ever been (a fact he’d been adjusting to ever since she opened the door), his thoughts were sober. But that scared him more than it should have. There was usually only one way to categorize a feeling like that, and that was respect.

He looked at her eyes now. The last time he’d seen them, they’d been red with tears.

No, now as she closes them, his mind plays tricks on him again. It’s his head that’s been the tenderest ever since Jet’s rescue operation—it’s the last thing refusing to heal. That blow from the flower pot wasn’t helping, but now, in that nanosecond when Faye’s eyelashes brushed her cheekbones, he could have sworn that he’d seen that look on her face—a long, long time ago.

The kettle whistled and Faye poured them tea. The weirdness continued.

“Never took you for a tea drinker,” Spike said, lamely. They’d had such little practice at actual conversation.

“Herbal,” Faye said, fingers tapping nervously on the table, “Trying to cure my nerves. Between quitting smoking and deadbeats coming back to life—”

She stopped; they both smirked at one another. This was the easiest they’d ever been with one another and it was still like having a conversation from either side of the Great Wall of China. If Jet thought this little scheme of his was going to suddenly make the old Bebop gang the great big happy family it never was, he had another think coming.

“So,” Faye said, “Did you find out an answer to your question?”

Spike scalded his tongue on his tea and cursed out loud. Faye got him a cold beer, adding, “Big baby,” for good measure. Their fingers touched, briefly, her fingers icy cold. She flicked her hand back nervously, like it had betrayed her, but she covered it up by making like she was just flicking the condensation away. Spike still kept the facts tucked away for later. Cold fingers. Eyelashes on her cheek. He swallowed. He could put two and two together. He never thought his dreams were for nothing, and he’d never had the habit of dwelling on his childhood longer than he had to. So he knew all those scattered memories had to mean something. He looked at Faye in a new way now; something that’d been happening over and over ever since she’d opened the door. 

“Yeah,” he answered, when she’d sat back down. She demurely took a sip of her tea, cocking her eyebrow again. Go on.

“Yeah, I found the answer,” Spike said, in an attempt to clarify.

“Well, I coulda answered it for you,” Faye said. She put down the tea cup impetuously, behaving like the Faye Valentine Spike remembered.

Earlier, his eyes had caught a name on the mail she had laid out on the counter. She went by a different last name now, something Chinese, but she kept Valentine smack dab in the middle, like a bridge between present Faye and the past.

That’s all she’d really needed: a bridge.

And now Faye fit into Spike’s time line in a way that finally made sense. It’s something that Julia’s presence had failed to do; she was too ghostly, too dreamy, because those were the aspects about her that Spike had loved the best. With Faye, he’d had no choice but to accept the worst aspects of her right off the bat, and the best parts revealed themselves like interpretations in an obscure dream. You were never really sure if you’d understood her right, or seen her as she was meant to be seen. She was once a little girl, a fact that had startled everyone when they found out, probably Faye most of all. He thinks he sees some of that girl in Faye now; it’s why she’s shedding certain parts of herself. The old clothes, the cigarettes, the whiplash of false solitude and co-dependency.

And for all Spike didn’t know then and sort of knew now, it felt like he was looking at Faye for the first time. For the second time. With second sight; no artificial observation here. He saw her in the grand scheme of things. Sitting across from him, lips pressed together, quaking with a rage that had always been quite innocent. She’d been more a child at twenty, sealed in that cryostation unit, than Spike had been at twelve, looking at her and lusting after her history.

“What was your answer, then?” He asked, shoulders draped carefully over the back of his chair, heart starting to hammer, perfect poker face.

“I would’ve said ‘yes,’”

“Yes, what?”

She looked at him a long time. First, her brow was knit tight, fighting through her old bratty habits. Then, she set her jaw. She pulled her chair along with her and placed it closer to Spike, so when she leaned in he had to lean back.

“Yes, you’re alive,” Faye said, “And no, you’re not living,”

When he kissed her, her lips didn’t cave in like snow, but they did sort of melt. His fingers, still cold from the beer bottle, traced cool answers on her warm skin. He just touched the side of her neck, reached for the back of her head. He kissed her like a boy kisses a girl; it seemed the most appropriate choice at the time, nothing fancy, nothing mature.

Then, he wasn’t kissing. He used his lips to feel her pulse, first at her neck, then at her wrist. Her breathing was soft, unhurried. He placed his lips on one eyelid and then the other and he found out what kind of lover she was. For all of Faye’s designer vitriol and showy sex appeal, when it came to men she was pretty inexperienced. It gave Spike the inclination to protect her, which is something he’d never felt with a woman before. He did so by wrapping his arms around her and lifting her from her chair. This was just the beginning for them, and his back was still aching, and his head for that matter, lots of places really, so he carried her to the couch and they proceeded to make out as chastely as possible. Call it fooling around; call it teenager antics. But Spike was a physical man and he wasn’t good with words, and at that moment the best way he could convey what had happened to him and what could happen between them was through his restraint, his attempts at tenderness, his involuntary movements. When she squeezed too tightly, she discovered where’d he almost bled to death. In a motion that felt more healing than sexual, she slipped a cool arm beneath his shirt and felt for the bandages. She took the tension out of her hands and instead kissed him, hard. Spike was impressed. She was learning. Then, because she was still mischievous at heart, she quickly placed a kiss on the swollen eyelid underneath his eye patch. Before he could say anything she was shifting out of his arms. One arm trailed after her, revealing more than he’d wanted to reveal.

She stood there, a hand over her mouth, not looking at him, but out the window.

“You’re not allowed to disappear after this,” she said, to the window.

“Who says I want to?”

She started laughing, sounding like she could cry at the drop of a hat, “Because you’re _**you**_ , Spike. I don’t think I’ll ever know what you’re thinking,”

“Look at me, Faye,”

He kept her gaze until she seemed to understand that it was his right eye that was missing.

“You think things can be different?” she asked. Like a child, one that’s been abandoned before.

“They are different,” he said, shrugging, no hint of sentimentality. Just the cold hard truth. He smirked before jumping up in one swift motion, deftly hiding the fact that his body was throbbing in protest. He reveled in the way she shrunk at his height, even now, as he passed by her to go open the door.

“Wait,” she said. Faye disappeared into the back of the apartment and came back with a hanger and something wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic. Spike took a peek.

“You kept my damn leisure suit?” he asked. He was genuinely shocked. She was genuinely blushing.

“If you tell Jet, I swear to God—”

He kissed her again, biting her bottom lip so she didn’t get cute.

He swung the article over his shoulder, walked out the door, bumped into the flower pot _**again** _(this time with just his shoulder), and walked all the way back to the **_Bebop_** in a satisfied daze, wherein Jet nagged him about forgetting the groceries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! Had this idea for a little while. I don't think I'll ever get tired of using Spike and Faye's largely unsketched histories as a playground for my fanfics. Plenty more where this came form, but hopefully they won't all be super long. Loosely based on my recollections of the series, but I'm about to start rewatching it so expect more tight ties to the series itself. Also, doesn't Tom Waits talking about his wife just make you swoon?


	6. Backwards Walk

Before Spike Spiegel came back from the dead, Faye remembered that her family was Catholic. 

She took a backwards walk through how she got here, with Spike's body on a slab in a water-logged part of Ganymede. 

She'd taken the Redtail and blown a few things to hell. 

She'd arced her way through the aftermath and found out how they'd just ** _left_ **Spike's body there in all the wreckage. Probably because the better part of the building was going up in flames and rescuing a dead body was a death wish. 

She'd tried taking his body by the arms first, but there was rigor mortis involved, and that made him twice as heavy as when he'd been alive. Faye was a slight woman, but then she had adrenaline on her side. 

See, she knew Spike wasn't _really_ dead. Rigor mortis--only the third stage of death. She'd just have to knock him back a few pegs.

Eventually, she did get his body into the aircraft, and she had to pilot her way out sitting on Spike's lap. His head lulled unto her shoulder and Faye suppressed a shudder all the way back to--she changed her mind at the last minute, because she wasn't going back to the **_Bebop_**. 

She sort of crash-landed on Ganymede, dousing passers-by with waves of engine-warmed water. When Faye and Spike cannon-balled into the terraformed sluice, Faye enjoyed the contrast of the oil and the cool undercurrent. Then, they were sinking.

Caution: Wet Corpse > Regular Corpse. 

It was a pair of strangers that rescued them. This was the part of the narrative that stunned Faye the most. She told them her friend was out cold; could they get a lift? If she'd been able to carry Spike herself, she would have done without asking favors. But at that moment, she'd had no choice. 

All she had to do was tell them, ominously, not to head to a hospital, and the strangers--an old couple--nodded in understanding. This was Ganymede. If you didn't want to be found out, all you had to do was say so. 

The old man knew a "safe" street that, although it was half-drowned, was relatively safe from prying eyes, and whose abandoned buildings could provide shelter--if one stayed on the second floor, that is.

That's where Faye found herself. On the second floor of an abandoned building in Ganymede, Spike on an overturned table with the legs missing, below them the _drip-drip_ of a house slowly falling into the world. And as the light shown through an opening in the roof (someone had been kind enough to leave mosquito netting in place, so they were safe from insects, if not from Ganymede's scheduled rains), Faye felt an ineffable peace. 

She used to feel that way in church. And it was this seemingly unrelated situation that brought that memory out of obscurity. That's how all her memories had returned to her--like photographs processed in a dark room. So, she thought wistfully, maybe it was the act of emerging from the water. Chemical process. A little light. 

In a manner of speaking, yes, she had regained her memory in full, all at once. But she didn't remember it all at once. It was like she had read this book once, but she didn't really recall the exact details, or names, or even a sense of meaning, not until she re-read certain passages. Now she remembered her parents dutifully taking her to church; her first taste of wine, a smoky sip at communion; the light through the stained glass windows; the smell of salt wafting from the beaches of Singapore and through the crack in the heavy entrance doors. 

And it was this memory that compelled her to trace the sign of the cross on Spike's forehead. 

Was this her first time touching him? Strange that she couldn't remember something which should have been certain and recent, when she could recall something so random and distant with full clarity. The memories were more distant than Faye dared to grasp--decades stood between her and the communion wine, and she doubted if that chapel still stood on its original stones. She looked at the lean of the floor beneath them and wondered why old buildings made her so happy, so sad. 

She gave Spike a kiss. It was an odd kiss--brief, stiff, lovely really, his lips still wet from Ganymede's rivers. Awkward. 

There'd always been an awkwardness between them. 

She touched her lips, then his. When she had kissed him, she could have sworn there had been a whisper of air. 

"Was it true?" she asked, "Wanting to see if you were really alive? What did dying go and show you, huh? Your timing _**sucks.**_ It's even worse than mine,"

She kissed him again. _But like every kiss, this one was an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eluded the power of language._

He opened his eyes when her back was turned, and you'd forgive him for thinking it was heaven, with the way the light scattered too-bright through the mosquito netting, and with the first thing he heard being a hymn hummed from a woman's lips. 

His legs pulled up, accordion-style, pushing a note of air out his chest in the process. The hymn abruptly stopped, and he felt a cool hand touch his face. At first, with concern. Then he received a slap he knew he deserved. 

Still--.

"What the hell, Faye?!" 

His timing was still off, so his surprised came _**after**_ he'd said her name. She hadn't even come into focus yet, but somehow he knew it was her. 

"Took you long enough," she huffed. Hiding behind charm and irritation, as usual. 

"Where are we?" he asked, voice small. He couldn't make it bigger. 

Gently, "Safe." Then, "What was it like, being dead for an hour?" 

He answered her like it was obvious:

"It was weird,"

"You alive yet?"

He kept his eyes open, despite the sun, because closing them felt too final. 

"I'm getting there,"

She was silent a long time. When she spoke at last, her own voice had gotten small. "I'm here."

"I know,"

Then he couldn't keep his eyes open. She got a bit closer, adjusting his body for him; his control was still in recovery. She willed her voice to be rough, tough, "Don't you ever take my damn friendship lightly ever, ever again. " And she kissed each of his closed eyelids, and it was that, and nothing else, that made his whole life flash before his eyes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick one, written right into AO3's text editor. That fact will probably make itself more clear to me when this has aged a bit.
> 
> I continue to color in the lines of Faye's backstory. 
> 
> I just really loved her interactions with that nun in the later episodes, and I was heavily, probably plagiaristically inspired by the last chapter in Sandor Marai's "Embers." (A gorgeous book if you like slow burn reads, or reads that make you feel like you're walking very slowly through an old house with just a candle to see by). So, I guess the combination of those things made this. 
> 
> The line in italics is the last line of "Embers." (I just changed the tense).


	7. High Lonesome

* * *

It wasn’t so much that it was a sideways kiss; or that is started as an accident. It was the fact that he adjusted her shoulder so that their faces fit together better, and that it lasted for more than a second. Took her breath away, clean.

* * *

  
It was a daily occurrence. She was sure, though she refused to check, that he was looking at her when either of them ended up in a corner or behind someone’s shoulder, or when the wind shifted. Always in line of sight. It made her feel tender and on edge all at the same time, which was really troublesome, but becoming less so.

* * *

  
One day he lingered on the gospel/bluegrass station, and apropos of nothing, shared both a cigarette and a fact:

“That part where they sound like they’re wailing for the hell of it? When soldiers come back from war, that’s the kinda sound they make. It’s called a high lonesome,”

* * *

Sometimes, she missed the bounty channel. But she doesn’t miss the choices she’s got now. When one door closes, a window opens. It’s something Jet said, and something that both Jet and Faye were in the midst of getting Spike to understand.

* * *

He approved of her new clothes. But the part that Faye actually cared about was that he liked them. For once, their taste overlapped. Well, maybe it had always overlapped more than either admitted. Still, somehow, the air between them was easier to breathe, so it was easier to share. They could eat breakfast without sarcasm, which was surprisingly nice. Faye found it the most relaxing part of her day.

* * *

_There is joy in you_

_There is peace in you_

_There is hope in you_

_There is rest in you_

_When you’re in my arms_

_Just as you are_

_You’re just the way I like_

  
Sometimes, Faye listened in on Spike’s music and thought it had something to do with her.

  
_There is love in you_

  
Well, pretending helped. Even if wasn’t true, even pretending that love songs were written for her made her a combination of things she always found were missing in herself. Music could be better than a memory. Longing could be better than getting.

* * *

  
At first, she tended bars at night. Jet, of all people, got her the job. Then, when Jet opened his own place, Faye was the third person he asked. He made sure to point that out—that she was third choice. In the recent past, this would have been a full episode between them—accusations of him being an old bitter ex-cop who always had it out for her, couldn’t even give her a compliment or do her a favor without making it seem underhanded—but the fact was that Faye was grateful and actually said thanks.

And the look on Jet’s face was absolutely worth it.

Something changed between them that day. It took the word tentative out of their friendship.

It changed things between her and Spike, too, but things were changing between them all the time. These days they were less mercurial and more…well, she’d decide on the apt planet one of these days. But she thinks maybe Jupiter. She had a fondness for Jupiter.

* * *

Spike caught her reading Ungaretti in the bath tub one day. She didn’t take it to mean much. He’d taken the time to read the spine of her book, never took a glance at the bubbles covering her chastely clavicle to kneecap, and cleared his throat before closing the door.

Faye went on not thinking much about it. Later that day Spike left on one of his many clandestine road trips. Things had been different since he’d returned from the dead. Mostly good-different. None of them—Jet, Faye, Spike—could claim to be bounty hunters anymore, but their old stringy bonds were now bound up by secrets half-shared and, between the three of them, a new lease on life. Bounty hunting was drying up; between new laws and new fashions and the disintegration of major syndicates like….

It’s like the name itself was a ghost. Really not worthy conjuring. Faye still shook whenever she thought about anything or anybody associated with the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate.

She shook the most when Spike returned from his long jaunts, smelling like his skin had been burned in several places, or with sharp lines that ran from the corner of his eyes to his cheekbones. The lines would go away after a few days, softened by sleep, and the smell would be replaced with engine oil and soap. (Faye had always loved the way he smelled, which was such an embarrassing thought that she blushed even when she had that thought all to herself).

But it went without saying that Spike did not want to talk about his new job. All they knew was it wasn’t bounty hunting.

Shortly after his return from his most recent trip, he was walking out of the steamy bathroom in his ratty robe, carrying his soap-on-a-rope, which made Faye burst into laughter, and which caused Spike’s face to turn to her and reveal that she had just done a terrible job of reading the room.

He approached her, and the burning smell still rolled off of him like he’d come out of a war zone. Faye knew she was half way to the truth. The other half of the truth made her too scared to think of it properly, but in that moment her brain did a mad dash for the pieces. There was no way the Syndicate had just dried up like that. Something had to account for the six weeks that they really, truly thought Spike was dead. Something had to add up to his crash landing into the Bebop’s docking hangar one day, bruised as old fruit, with a scarred eyebrow and a hollow look in his eye. Spike had done his best to hide facts from them; he’d never be somebody you could know clear through, but this time the hiding was way more deliberate.

Except when it wasn’t. Now Spike stood in front of her, looking way more menacing than a guy holding soap-on-a-rope should, which is exactly what she told him. She’d do anything to get rid of this prickly sense of dread.

He smirked.

“Wanna know how your debts just magically got snapped away?” he asked her in a voice she had only heard twice before. The last time, when he’d banged into their hangar, death’s newest escapee. The first, when he’d told her about his eyes. A story, she realized now, that only Julia had known.

Faye was afraid but wasn’t going to show it. But she was, of course, afraid underneath it all because she felt the new balance of their lives on the line. Perhaps she should go on avoiding this, avoiding what was really going on with Spike, to stop finding him in vulnerable positions like this, to stop noticing things, prodding, forever on a watch set to the absolute worst timing—.

“I know it was you,” It came out as one thready breath.

“It’s who I work for,”

“No, no,” Faye had immediately started shaking her head, “You’re not with them still—”

“If I don’t run things, Faye, then bad things happen. Or worse things,”

She looked him in the eyes—more specifically, deliberately, his left eye. “You’re trapped.”

“’We are the flow of shadows’,” he said, twirling his rope like an awkwardly weighed lasso and sliding past her with a cold grin, “’They are the seed that bursts within our dreams,’”

He whistled cheerfully when he walked past her, making it worse, and she was so shaken up that she did not come to dinner that night, and it took her till she started brushing her teeth before going to bed to realize that Spike had been quoting Ungaretti.

She looked frantically through her copy of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s **_Selected Poems_** and found what she was looking for. A long poem called ‘La Pieta.’

Faye was astonished, read the poem four times. She had always thought this poem so personal to her, like it was a love letter written sixty-four years before she was born.

  
_I have only arrogance and kindness._

_And I feel exiled among men._

  
Faye shook her head to clear it. She got to reading section 3 of the poem again. It was split into four sections, but the third was the shortest. She stared at it a long time, really staring into the crowded space of her thoughts, before taking in a resolute breath and walking out of her room, book still in hand.

She strode to the living room, where Spike usually crashed on the couch. If he wasn’t there, he’d be mooning about the hangar or, rarely, actually asleep in his old room. But things fell according to plan and Faye found Spike lounging on the living room couch.

He snored softly in his sleep. Faye looked at him, the poem practically singing in her head:

  
_The light that goads us_  
_Is an ever thinner thread._

_Will you still dazzle, if you do not kill?_

_Give me the highest joy._

  
“Will you still dazzle, if you do not kill?” Faye asked aloud. The soft snoring stopped, and the bony arm that had been thrown across Spike’s eyes now pulled away.

“Why would you come back?” Faye asked him pointlessly, “If what you said was true, aren’t we in danger?”

It was a practical question, even if it wasn’t actually the first thing that had crossed Faye’s mind.

“They were going to hunt you down,” Spike said, in a rare plain-speaking mood, “So I lied. I explained that the Bebop had been doing surveillance on Vicious and Julia almost the entire time. Turns out you and Julia had a run-in, so it actually lined up better than I could have hoped,”

So Spike knew about that. Of course he did. Faye found herself weary of the talk already. Now that she knew that her worst fears were real, she felt so tired. She sat down on the edge of the couch, absorbed some of the warmth from Spike’s legs.

“They say be careful what you wish for,” Faye smiled sadly at him, “I wished you weren’t dead, at the very least,”

He got up, and this time it wasn’t a sideways kiss and it didn’t start out accidental. Spike was a perfect kisser; Faye ought to have known, because he was a good whistler too. He kissed her like this was an old-time movie, and she felt classy and breathless all at once.

_Give me the highest joy._

She didn’t know you could be this happy and this miserable at the same time. She felt almost like she had when her memories had come flooding back to her. Something else flooded her chest; looking at him was painful and irresistible.

“I like Ungaretti,” he said, in that sly way of his. Faye would have to parse later any number of meanings that could be found in those words, that look, their first real kiss. “All his poems are like one long high lonesome.”

Faye remembered the book was in her hands and passed it to him. She found it among his packed things the next time he was set to go. But this time she kissed him goodbye.

* * *

  
Faye and Jet are no longer bounty hunters. But they still know how to pack heat. A day after Spike’s latest departure, they gave each other a knowing look before following a tracker that Faye may or may not have slipped as a bookmark into her copy of _**Selected Poems**_.

“We might die,” Jet said.

Faye finished packing an extra round of bullets—her good luck round, she called it. “At least we won’t be making the same mistake as last time,”

“You always were an optimist,”

“If I don’t die,” Faye promised, “I’ll work the bar a whole month for free,”

“You get paid more in tips anyway,”

“What I’m trying to say is—don’t die.”

“Yeah, well, same to you.”

And they were off. Faye found herself wishing—no, praying again, and she didn’t tell Jet, but lately she’d had pretty good mileage with her wishes and prayers. She felt even better when she tuned into the radio, trying to hum out some of her nerves, and heard a high bright lonesome pierce through the stars and all their rawness.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song is 'There Is Love In You,' which I think is a traditional, but I first heard from the Prisonaires.


	8. Topaz

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize in advance for the formatting of this one-shot. For some reason, no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to look like the other ones. So, sorry if extra spaces make it tougher to read! :p

*  


*

  
“You gonna bum my cigarette this time?” 

  
“I bummed yours last time, it’s your turn to beg,” Faye replied. 

  
Yan (Faye’s favorite) rolled her eyes and held out a sun-spotted hand. Faye gave her a cigarette and used her own to light it. They both stood on the balcony and watched the blue smoke rise. 

  
An old friend of Faye’s had gotten her this job: a medical care assistant at the Honey-Honey Life-Enriching Retirement Community in Singapore. 

  
Funny, if they were going by a normal calendar, Yan was actually _younger_ than Faye. Yan was about sixty-nine; bad hip had gotten Yan coerced into entering the retirement center early. Yan refused to either dye or cut her hair, so she wore it in one long iron braid down her back. She was a bitter woman, but something about her still savored life, especially the little things. She liked to refer to her tastes as something like “burnt orange.”

  
“Sour, sweet, bitter, and to hell with it!” Yan said, “That’s my life’s philosophy,”

  
Faye knew Yan’s life story. And Yan knew Faye’s life story. Yan knew, too, that Faye was in love with a dead man. 

  
“Are you sure you don’t have a boyfriend?” Yan teased.

  
“Yeah,” Faye dragged on her cigarette, then put it out early in an absence of mind, “You know anybody?” 

  
Yan snorted, “Well, that guy you never name sounded like one hell of a charmer. Even if he wasn’t much of a catch,”

  
“Nope, he wasn’t much of a catch,” 

  
“Love’s about loving all of it. That’s why it’s a bitch,” 

  
“He’s dead, Yan,” Faye said, making it more blunt than she wanted it. No, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. It’s what she needed to hear. It’s what Jet had told her on their visit, right before she flew back here. That she needed to actually say it out loud and believe it: Spike was dead. Sure, there hadn’t been a funeral. There wasn’t even a grave. But Faye’s parents hadn’t had any of those either, and it didn’t matter; they were removed by over half a century. 

  
Faye figured she should be used to people dying. After all, not long ago, she’d been a bounty hunter. It was part of the trade. It was just part of life. She ought to be grown up enough to accept all of that by now. 

  
“Whatever you say, cowgirl,”

  
“Whatever I say?” Faye retorted, “There’s no way he survived. You don’t go in with a single gun and face down a syndicate and survive. Even if that guy was alive, he’d be dead the moment I saw him. Disappearing like that—dammit, Yan, you’re getting my hopes up,”

  
Yan shrugged, putting on a merciless expression. 

  
“Life’s too short not to hope,” she said, before exhaling an impressive cloud with an aaa— “—Aaaand, life’s too short to mope. If you’re over this guy, stick flowers on the grave already and put yourself out there. I’m tired of you wasting those titties on us old folks—gawd, it makes me sick. If I had your body, I’d be dining fine every night and getting kissed with the reckless abandon I deserve!” 

  
*

  
*

  
_Faye's father, as usual, went overboard for her birthday. His excuse was she was turning twenty: the age of majority, in the age of space. Anything was possible, her life was just beginning, oh, he made it all sound so sparkling._

  
_He bought her tickets to see the moon. Faye, her mother, her father, the three of them would go the day after her birthday. August 14th, there was a picnic and Faye wore a yellow dress. Her mother held the topaz earrings up to her ears and said:_

  
_“It’s an impurity, you know. The color,”_

  
_Her mother was an academic. A professor of history. She often spoke in factual quips._

  
_“Fascinating, I think,” her mother continued, “That these little accidents of nature are the most beautiful. Then again, God doesn’t make mistakes,”_

  
_Is that what her mother thought, when the Gate tore through the moon the following day?_

  
_It was so strange, Faye remembered at the time, staring softly at Earth and feeling so weightless and free, there in a tour ship called_ Lucky Star _. It was so strange that Faye had at first found the broken fragments of the moon beautiful. The moon, **the moon** , shattered like some expensive vase. The moon was supposed to be a constant, as constant as her mother or her father or her youth. _

  
_It was too strange to believe. Faye just remembered things glistening, and out of orbit, and a little off-kilter. Then it all got unbearably hot, and the vertigo, and the drag, and then the nothingness._

  
_*_

  
*

  
Earth was back on the mend, people were saying. There were more people coming than going—for the first time in half a century. The collapse of the Red Dragon Syndicate had terribly unforeseen consequences on damn near everything. It had left a vacuum in the economy, a space for more wholesome practices, less chaos, more law.

  
“We don’t have a Wild West anymore,” one of the patients at Honey-Honey had said as Faye strolled by, “We’ve lost it, twice,”

  
“Well, they shouldna been allowed to break the law this long,” replied his conversation partner. Faye had, by this point, slowed down enough so she could eavesdrop in style. 

  
“Well, space is gonna go and get civilized,” the first guy puffed, spitting out some tobacco and barely missing Faye’s foot, “Sterile. There’s no bounty hunters, no renegades, no cowboys—dull, dull, dull,”

  
“You’re just a cranky old coot who misses his favorite TV show,”

  
“That Bounty Channel? That was only part of it. Oh, hell. Nobody knows. Before I got stuck here, I was one of them. I was a cowboy. I could dance, and shoot, and get girls with breasts as perfect as—”

  
Faye saw, now, that the old man was staring directly at her. At her chest, anyway. She gave him a withering look and marched past them in a huff. 

  
But as soon as she rounded a corner she put her back to the cool bleached-white wall and thought—all of that was true. 

  
The world wasn’t just changing, it had changed. They’d come to the end of an era, and Faye was poised on the edge of it, and, just like last time, alone in facing it. 

  
*

  
*

  
A water-logged child’s piano was all that remained of the original furniture. Among the wreckage of her family home, Faye was surprised the whole thing hadn’t simply been cleared away and built over. This whole neighborhood could have easily become a mall or a spaceport by now. 

  
Faye secured her Red Tail and walked, her boots sucking in the mud, all the way up to the little piano. She tested a cord on its keys. Out of tune, of course. She scavenged for something to sit on anyway. 

  
The sun was setting, turning the white veneer a pink shellac. Few people walked around this part of town. Despite being a prime location for squatters, it was still penned in by bank-owned settlements, and a sizable police force parked its headquarters just down the street. So a few old grannies and one police officer and a kid with a cold passed blandly by, and they all remained in the pink, fuzzy distance. Faye played. 

  
It was a song the piano was intimately familiar with it. It hadn’t played that song in almost fifty years. It missed its accompaniment. It missed the deep, sure voice of the cello. Faye thought of her father; when she’d first remembered him, he’d been playing the cello and tossing her clownish faces from behind her piano where she played, just to make it harder for her to keep a straight face and hit the right keys. He’d always called her his little troublemaker, but where did he think she got it from? 

  
He’d died like he’d lived: extravagantly, without regrets. Faye nodded her head. Somehow she knew this was true. Her mother, too. She’d died like she’d lived. She hadn’t believe in mistakes, even if she believed in quirks. 

  
But what did Faye believe? How would she live? What did she want? 

  
She played.

  
She wanted what she’d always wanted. To belong. To be touched by somebody. She wanted simple things. She wanted topaz, not diamonds. Oh, but she wanted big things too. She wanted the moon. She wanted the stars. 

  
If she was going to have anybody, he’d be bigger than life. That’s why. That’s why she hadn’t—. She continued to play alone. 

  
*

  
*

  
“What’s today’s date again?” Faye asked through a curtain of toothpaste foam. 

  
Jet, distracted by the Bebop’s newest technical inefficiency, answered, “…fourteenth of—uh, August,” 

  
Faye’s eyes widened. How old was she now? Twenty-four, or was it seventy-eight? 

  
She spat out the toothpaste into Jet’s kitchen sink, reached for a glass of water to gargle, “Guess I’ve got some celebrating to do,”

  
It was odd that Faye wasn’t bitter about this, but Spiegel had actually died around her birthday. He had at least had the decency not to die on the exact date, but they were nearing the first-year anniversary come the end of this month. 

  
Spiegel. 

  
She referred to him that way now, not by his first name. There was almost something more intimate about using his last name, because nobody had ever used it on him. 

  
But the name was important to her too. 

  
She just hadn’t known it. Not till about a year ago, when her memories came flooding back. Now every time she took a shower she was afraid of another attack of memories—they came in torrential slipstreams. One time she remembered a whole semester of school, another time the first half of a song slipped into her fingertips followed by the second half the next time she rinsed off. Childhood vacations, the color of her mother’s eyes, her first school crush, the taste of kaya toast. 

  
Or a ten-minute composition that had quietly dominated her adolescence and hung in the shadows of the major figure of Faye’s young life: her own father, bent over his cello. _Spiegel im Spiegel_. Mirrors in the mirror. 

  
And now when she dreams, sometimes its her father at the cello, and sometimes it’s him. 

  
He won’t even leave her the fidelity of her memories.

  
She’s making him more important than he was. 

  
She’s in love, in that unhappy way. She’d made it her life’s mission to not be so unhappy again. 

  
But damn it all, she remembered what it was like to love now, and to be loved. She couldn’t forget her father’s silly faces, or the feel of her mother’s dry hands brushing her cheek as she clipped on topaz earrings that were probably hurling forever in space somewhere along with the debris of the moon. She couldn’t forget the fact that Spike Spiegel was bigger than life and he’d gotten away. That she’d never had him to begin with. 

  
She figured she’d celebrate her seventy-eighth anyway.

  
*

  
*

  
She should play this part _tempo rubato_. She could fill this day with as little or as much as she wanted. She was free. 

  
She rescued the child’s piano from the mud and brought it back to her apartment (of course she hadn’t bothered getting a permit to hoist the thing with her Red Tail). It made her bare apartment look purposefully spare, in a classy way, instead of in that more common way——necessity. 

  
She bought kaya toast off a street vendor. She searched the yellow sections in pawn shops, looking for earrings that would make her feel nostalgic. But none of them were good enough. 

  
An increasing sense of frustration. Like the day was getting away from her. Like she was not, in fact, the one in control of playing out her life. 

  
She felt that way a lot lately. 

  
She passed by a florist just as it began to rain and looked at her miserable reflection on the glass. Faye was beautiful when she was sad. She knew that. She had the right look for sadness; and it was the first thought she’d had about Julia, back when she’d first seen her. It seemed whenever Faye thought about Spiegel—and she’d been trying not to all day and failing—she couldn’t help but think about Julia. Like they came as a set. Lucky them. They came and went together, and here Faye was, feeling sorry for herself being all alone on her birthday, looking at the flowers she was going to place on Spiegel’s grave. 

  
After parting with her well-earned woolongs, Faye pulled her trench coat close around her and the flowers. She was a bare-headed island amongst a sea of umbrellas. All the umbrellas were going in the opposite direction, and she pushed upstream. Back, the long way, to where she’d started: her family’s estate. 

  
She found the place where her piano had just been that morning and lay the white bouquet down in the mud. If there was supposed to be a resounding sense of closure, she didn’t catch it. It felt like she had caught a cold instead; she sneezed. 

  
“I’m never gonna get you back.” 

  
The house, the topaz earrings, the cello to her piano…technically, she could replace these things. And as for loneliness? She had people to talk to. People that made her laugh, made her angry, made her get up in the morning. She thought of Yan and her patients. She thought of Jet. Sometimes she even thought of Ed and Ein. 

  
But Faye had been looking a long time, her whole life, even back before the moon itself came crashing down; she'd been looking for someone. Someone like a mirror. Faye didn’t want to see herself staring back. That was the definition of loneliness. She wanted to stare into somebody else’s eyes and find herself there. 

*

*

  
Faye had not fallen slowly in love. It hadn’t taken her months to warm up to Spike Spiegel. And it hadn’t happened at first sight or during an adrenaline rush or with a stab of loneliness.

  
It had happened the day he died. The day he looked her in the eye. She saw all her stolen time there and, it’s going to sound vague, it’s going to sound dreamy, it’s going to sound incomplete, but, she saw all her stolen time there and it felt alright. It felt like she had been hurtled through space and time and loneliness for that one climactic moment. It was romantic, it was tragic, it was electric, it was inevitable. 

  
*

  
*

  
So you’d think anything after that would be anticlimactic. 

  
Faye still looked for him around street corners. When she passed by other pilots in air traffic, she often peered through the glass with the hope of spotting him in the cockpit. A knock on the door, and she’d wonder if he’d be waiting on the other side. A message from Jet and she always half-hoped he’d heard some new rumor. She passed by a mirror and she saw his face, not hers. Why? Was she just addicted to the past, any past, any scrap, no matter how impossible to re-obtain? 

  
She’d thought of a bunch of things to talk about with him and Jet, after her memories had crystallized. Of course her memories had come too late; she couldn’t share any of herself with him now. She couldn’t reveal the personality that was at the core of her, that wasn’t just the product of hunger or betrayal or playing-for-keeps. 

*

*

  
It was the end of August before she knew it. 

  
On August 31st, she visited with Yan, talked some, laughed some, and left work in a cheerful-enough mood. 

  
The rain came down like it had on her birthday.

The umbrellas popped up all around her, leaving her exposed.

Her and one other one—tall, shaggy, walking to their own tempo. Faye had been making weak attempts at cutting off the habit of riffling through crowds, looking for ghosts. But she still couldn’t resist peering up. 

  
When he saw her in the rain, did she have that beauty that had enticed him, once? 

When he looked in her eyes, did he see himself there? 

  
Could she bum his cigarette? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not my best work, but right now my aim is quantity over quality: I want to write more this year than ever before. There's some bits in here I like, and I was able to actually expound on an idea instead of discovering the idea mid-story, so that was nice. May go back and clean up the structure and weird dangling lines, but, for now, it's good to be back.


	9. Offstage Lines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was tired of all my ideas being too long and complicated or, when trying to go for a quick one-shot, finding myself staring at a blank page. So I scavenged my morgue file and found these lines and tried to put rhyme and reason to them. There may not be much of either, but I hope you enjoy a little Faye/Spike anyway.

> _ “I don’t trust people who look for their personality in a cigarette.” _

Once, on a bounty, Faye had heard Spike play the piano in the dark. Then he'd uttered that line while leaning over to ash on the other guy's shoulder. That was his cue that this guy was their mark. Faye had taken him down easily in a choke hold, but she remembered feeling sorry that the song had ended. And she'd wondered what Spike had meant by that line. 

After they made bounties illegal, after Spike went down for the count, she was barhopping and heard a player piano in the dark and she imagined it was him: a ghost, playing the keys. The song even fit Spike's playing style: jaunty and sad and unassuming, till all the keys were slammed together in a cacophonous finish, with a bang. 

She sees him everywhere. She expects to run into him at the bar, on the street, to see him piloting one of the aircraft at the hangar, that it’ll be his voice on the comm. She’s searching for him—because there’s a rumor that he’s alive. 

\--

> _"I only fall in love once in a blue moon."_

Faye knows Spike could have just been some other guy. That, if she chose to, she could fall in love with darn near anyone. Humans were fascinating that way. And human contact was so rare. When you had it, why treat it like dirt?

She doesn't know why she treats fine stuff like dirt. Now that her memories are back, she remembers being a rich girl, sure. But she'd known the value of money, then. She'd had a pair of diamonds she'd got from her grandmother and she'd treated them like her most prized possessions. She wonders where they are now. 

It's true, though, the blue moon thing. And when it happened, it happened all the way. Frankly, she didn't know any other way to do it, and that was true even before the amnesia.

> _"Only once in a blue moon."_

She remembers her first kiss. It was Halloween in Singapore and she was fourteen and had gone as a cowgirl. They had a projector and were playing some scary movie on the beach and--Teddy, that was his name--he had soft lips and braces and had put on his dad's cologne. He'd leaned back and smiled and said she tasted like strawberries. 

And about a century later, Faye leans back from her own strawberry daiquiri and smiles. 

"Darling," said the gentleman in the bar stool next to her, "That's a damn serendipitous thing to say when you're living on one of the moons of Jupiter," 

Ah, Ganymede. This place never got old. If Spike ever came back, if those rumors really were true, she thinks that serendipity would bring him here. 

\--

> _ “I’ve got a wish a mile high.” _

One of Spike's lines again. He'd been tossing a coin up and down, up and down, and then, apropos of nothing, had taken out his little pistol and shot it right through. Back then she sometimes wondered if Spike did weird stuff like that to impress her. Or to keep up his aloof loner outfit. What was genuine and what was affectation? 

For her part, after Spike had gone, Faye put down the affectations. She stopped hiding behind her halter top and her cigarettes. Being bored and penniless probably helped--what the hell was she supposed to do without bounty hunting? 

Honestly, she probably would have quit after Spike went down, regardless of how healthy the business was. Because she finally knew what she wished for, and there, now that she knew what was in front of her, the moron got up and walked away. 

She tries the coin trick. She misses. But mutters his line anyway, feeling cool, feeling foolish, wondering if she's alone when she whispers it, "I've got a wish a mile high."

She could only live on rumors for so long. 


	10. Wedding Ring

It took Faye 54 years to remember her last name, and then she went and changed it.

She had this theory about wedding rings. The more complicated they were, the more they were compensating for something. Faye wanted her wedding ring to mean exactly one thing: I belong to somebody, and they belong to me.

She has a further theory about relationships: either you were going to marry the lug or you weren't. No "conscious uncoupling," no "the fire is gone." Honey, fires go out, that's why you chop more firewood.

Getting married and then not overthinking it is the first mature decision she's made in ages. Faye figures maybe she got to skip so much of the hellish design of one's twenties because, well, she'd technically been twenty-three forever. Maybe she was allowed to make good decisions now. Maybe she'd paid her dues. Maybe she was happy.

She writes down her soon-to-be-married-name like a schoolgirl; she takes forever and a day making the perfect cursive 'S.'

Then, she gets married twelve hours after she's proposed to (was she proposed to? It felt like they'd both proposed to each other, but not in so many words. They'd been perfect dorks about it, looking back).

Like she told him--"Either you're in or you're out." It breaks her heart when he has to fumble for her hand. She'd found Spike in the rubble of the life he'd once lived: an entire crime syndicate with all its heads cut off. He'd talked so much about seeing double visions that she wonders if it's not a sad miracle that the day the Red Dragon Syndicate collapsed Spike lost his eyesight.

Instead of sealing their vows with a kiss on the mouth, Faye pulls Spike's head down so she can kiss both of his eyelids. She does it before she can even think.

Spike smirks, "Well, _be thou my vision_."


End file.
